The hardest season

Danette Goulet

His brother would have been 37 years old today.

It is just one of the many crushing realizations that Paul Hoffman

deals with as he grieves daily for his brother, Stephen, who perished

with thousands in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and whose life was

chosen to be documented Friday on 48 Hours.

Stephen Hoffman was a bond broker at Cantor-Fitzgerald on the 104th

floor of the north tower -- the first tower hit by an airplane hijacked

by terrorists, but the second tower to go down.

“We were just hoping against hope that he found an air pocket because

they said a human can live for like 10 days,” Paul Hoffman, 38, said of

his brother. “We kept waiting to hear that first week, then two, then it

was a month.”

Steve Hoffman was the 12th of 13 children and a twin. He had a wife,

Gabrielle, and a 5-year-old daughter named Madeline.

He coached a football team in the city, which he used to help get

children off the streets.

“He was a surrogate father to about 2,000 kids over the years,” said

Paul Hoffman, remembering trips he’d taken with his little brother into

seedier areas of New York.

“He’d go into the worst neighborhoods. He’d have a football and throw

it up in the air,” the Huntington Beach man recalled. “He’d get these

kids food and shoes or sneakers. He’d tell them ‘today’s a good day, you

can change your life’.”

Steve Hoffman and his team helped motivate thousands of children and

aided hundreds in getting scholarships.

Hoffman describes his brother as being bigger than life. A great and

loving husband a wonderful father to his daughter as well as inner-city

children and a go-getter Type A personality all the way.

“He’d think there was 60 hours in the day,” Hoffman said laughing as

he described how his brother would plan one thing after another and do

more in one day than most people did in a week.

It is one of the reasons the family speculates that Stephen knew on

some level that his life would be cut short.

“We think maybe he knew,” Hoffman said. “He took that Sunday [before

Sept. 11] off to be with his wife and kid, which he never did. They went

to [a concert by] John Cougar Mellencamp, for a picnic, to the pumpkin

patch, then apple picking. On Monday he got home with an hour left of

light and took them to play nine holes of golf.”

Steve Hoffman’s widow also told a grief group of her husband waking up

three or four times during the summer to horrible nightmares. He woke up

crying and telling his wife “I’m burning,” Hoffman said.

While all the surviving members of this large, close-knit family have

continued to suffer since the attacks, the holidays are proving

especially difficult.

“This is a tough time of year. I’d send him stuff in the mail,” Paul

Hoffman remembered, before jumping even further back into memories of

childhood Christmases in the Forrest Hill neighborhood of Queens, NY.

“We’d line up in age order at the top of the stairs to wait for Santa.

My parents would yell at us to go to bed and we’d scatter,” he said with

a chuckle. “Then we’d sneak back out, get in age order and wait all

night.”

Hoffman moved to Huntington in November of 1984, one year after his

older brother Joe. The Hoffman boys loved to fish and surf.

“I remember Steve got out to visit once -- we surfed the cliffs and by

the pier,” he recalled.

Once an avid surfer, Paul Hoffman said he no longer finds the same joy

in surfing. Like most surfers, there was a time when it just felt good to

paddle out even on small days. But the void he feels now is encompassing.

The pastime he once shared with his brother leaves him flat, he said.

A grieving group he attends with his brother Joe and the love of his

wife Monique and daughter Niccole, 6, are what get him through the day,

he said.

He describes his grief as a roller coaster -- one that is getting

tougher to ride as the holidays approach.

When he took Niccole to see Santa Claus at Fashion Island, she sat on

Mrs. Claus’ lap and made her Christmas wish.

“Niccole told Mrs. Claus about the bad man who flew the airplane into

the tower and said ‘I want my uncle Steve back so my Dad can stop

crying’,” Paul Hoffman said. “You think kids don’t understand, but they

do. They’re smarter than you think and you don’t mean to act different

but you do.”

Paul Hoffman and his family are not alone in grieving for his brother.

At a memorial held in Forrest Hill where they grew up thousands turned

out, filling a church and the street outside, to remember the man who

dedicated much of his time to helping others.

“I’m trying not to focus on how he died, but how he lived,” Paul

Hoffman said. “He was just always there for others. He was just a

terrific guy. It’s not going to be an easy holiday. We have to try to

pick up the pieces and move on.”